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You've never seen the results of the cameras. The suspect is seldom co-operative enough to face the camera straight on, and when they are it's usually a case of "Have you seen this amorphous grey blob? Police would like to speak to him..."

I'm not sure whether either the Anonymous attacks or the funny quips will help the case of civil liberties.

Sure, you and I know that the way civil liberties have been eroded in the past decade is a bad thing. Unfortunately, most voters really haven't. And if people attack government websites, it will only strengthen THEIR case, not the case of those who want civil liberties restored.

You taking the liberty of bringing down websites to ask for more liberties is roughly the same as if someone started to randomly shoot people proclaiming that he will continue killing people until murder will finally become legal.

It's entirely irrelevant whether your point is a valid one (as, in my opinion, it is in the case of civil liberties -- for most bystanders that really don't have a clue on why this is even important. To them, the government is doing the right thing, seeing that that kind of surveillance would actually be needed to prevent further attacks on government websites.

Right now, I don't know what the right course of action is to convince the governments that more and more surveillance is a bad thing. I wish I knew what the right course of action would be.

What I do know, though, is that attacking government websites is the WRONG way.

You taking the liberty of bringing down websites to ask for more liberties is roughly the same as if someone started to randomly shoot people proclaiming that he will continue killing people until murder will finally become legal.

Er, you understand that the whole point of protest is to cause disruption, right? It is a vital part of democracy, the option to march down a street and hold the traffic up because there is no alternative. It's just a shame that we have got to the stage where it is pretty much the only option.

DDOS'ing a web site doesn't seem to be any different that DDOS'ing a road by walking down it in a large group.

You taking the liberty of bringing down websites to ask for more liberties is roughly the same as if someone started to randomly shoot people proclaiming that he will continue killing people until murder will finally become legal.

Er, you understand that the whole point of protest is to cause disruption, right? It is a vital part of democracy, the option to march down a street and hold the traffic up because there is no alternative. It's just a shame that we have got to the stage where it is pretty much the only option.

DDOS'ing a web site doesn't seem to be any different that DDOS'ing a road by walking down it in a large group.

Not anymore! Now you can march down a street, but only as long as that street is a 5'x5' section designated as a "free speech zone" for you to march around in a circle in.

It is a vital part of democracy, the option to march down a street and hold the traffic up because there is no alternative.

Which generally just annoys people. I really, really, don't care about your cause, and tend to hate you personally, when you are making me sit in traffic while your little protest goes on. There are better ways to communicate than to block traffic.

Again - it's good that YOU see that this way. Many non-nerds will not see that difference. So, whenever the media covers these kinds of events, note how the say "denial of service ATTACKS", not "denial of service DEMONSTRATION".

Can you see how this might make an important (and negative) difference in the minds of your parent's/grandparent's generation?

And importantly, noone calls these things 'demonstrations' - look at the linked zdnet article headline "hacks UK government sites". It's the same kind of la

The media may be partially to blame - but the problem is that even journalists aren't necessarily the most tech-savvy bunch.

And look at this - even wikipedia calls it "Denial-of-service attack" - maybe because in most cases, DDOS attacks were actual attacks on companies or websites, and most of them didn't find the kind of publicity then, that DDOSing the government finds now.

Besides, why would it be the medias fault for calling it attacks when you see the ones causing it using the exact same language?

Have you ever been to a real life protest? Hyperbole is the order of the day, and this is Anonymous we are talking about. Again, I never said they were good at this.

If you stage a demonstration, people hold up banners to make clear what they are demonstrating for. Even if the DDOS packets that overwhelmed the government sites contained the words "we want our civil liberties back" - it still is nothing that could be seen by outsiders.

Well, they tried with Twitter and a release on Pastebin, but being disorganized the message wasn't very co

I'm not saying wikipedia is the "source of my argument" - I'm saying, it's not just the media who get this wrong, if even wikipedia (a site nerds CAN help editing) uses that terminology.

I'm also absolutely getting the misuse of the word "hacked" here - prominently featured even in the article here on slashdot.Again - the problem is not that you or I understand that the word 'hacked' is wrong. The problem is the point you're admitting yourself: "Again, I never said they were good at this", or "Anonymous don'

You taking the liberty of bringing down websites to ask for more liberties is roughly the same as if someone started to randomly shoot people proclaiming that he will continue killing people until murder will finally become legal.

"Roughly the same". That's the most insane analogy I've seen on Slashdot, And there have been some doozies.

I'm not sure whether either the Anonymous attacks or the funny quips will help the case of civil liberties.

I don't think that anything would. The reason they're eroding is that communism fell, so the powers that be no longer have any reason to pretend being nice. And they learned their lesson about having their own rethoric turned against them, thus the focus is on "security" with the new terrorism boogeyman (and the bit older drugs one).

Hactivism (or any other sort of activism for that matter) is a rather desperate and pointless endevour because it will not lead to any change whatsoever in the direction the hacktivists hope for. It is just useless effort, often even damaging to their cause.

The only way to change things is to make people at large stop voting always the same parties into the parliaments. If you have effort or money to spend, support your local pirate parties. Persuade eligible voters to vote for them.

Whatever you do, have a clearly defined and well distinguished political party to be able to channel the support you gained. Votes are the only currency that counts. Hacktivism, demonstrations, OWS, etc are all just useless masturbation if they dont rally around a specific political party.

The problem is political. You wont solve a political problem by non-political means. You cant beat them at their game without playing the game. You have to get in there, however dirty and rigged it may be in ther favor, and win against all odds. Only by winning will you get to change future rules.

Hacktivism is none of that. It is a vulgar display of wretched, powerless frustration and doesnt indicate that you are or ever will be, a winner. It communicates the exact opposite, even more so.

Hmmm. While mostly I don't agree with Anonymous in some cases they are outlaw 'Robin Hoods' - in the fact they are outside the law opposing bad and corrupt governance. This law, and many of those recently proposed in the UK, are just *bad*. Hopefully the sensationalist nature of this (which is relatively harmless as far as protests go) will draw the attention of the citizenry to these bad laws.

Demonstrations are a way to both demonstrate to the politicians that you personally care about something, and to bring awareness of an issue to the larger public. Making the public aware of issues is critical to persuading them to change their voting.

The first step to a public debate is making the media discuss it. All the better if it's about something the politicians don't want to talk about.

They dont care whether you care or dont care because they know that they will be elected anyway.

> bring awareness of an issue to the larger public.

Irrelevant. If they dont have a party sympathetic to the demonstrated cause to vote for at the next elections, the awareness alone will not lead to any change. You have to have a party channeling the awareness into political change.

Ok, so you're in a political mindset where only politicians have the power to change things.But that's not true. Politicians have to suffer consequences of their actions. Politicians who are exposed as corrupt face public outing and shaming. Politicians who do clearly do not have the public support may be forced to resigned.And of course, as a notion spreads through the populace, people within the political parties are also likely to pick up such opinions.I think your dismissal of demonstrations as a tool f

The only way to change things is to make people at large stop voting always the same parties into the parliaments. If you have effort or money to spend, support your local pirate parties. Persuade eligible voters to vote for them.

The previous government tried to bring in something similar, and both the parties making up the current coalition opposed them but are now pushing forwards with basically the same thing. The Lib Dems even got as far as setting up a web site where you could tell them which freedoms you wanted back, but that seems to have been forgotten now.

You could vote for a non-mainstream party, but that is just a wasted vote under our system. Really the only option is to pick Labour or Tory based on who you think will fuck up the economy less or reduce your personal tax burden.

Protest is all we have left, and they have done their best to ignore that. How many protests can you remember hearing about so far this year? Occupy ended I suppose... But no-one else managed to even make the TV news. Anonymous's action got a response from mainstream politicians and hours of coverage this morning.

Pirate parties in Sweden and especially Germany have won a significant amount of votes. They now have approx 10% acceptance according to polls, and are already making goverment coalitions impossible that have been the norm for the last 40 years.

> Starting a change on the political level is technically impossible.

Paralysis by analysis. If the pirate party founders thought in terms of impossiblities, not formed a political wing, and only resorted to desperate and u

Indeed. If enough people are willing to vote based on a particular point, politicians will pay attention. And if they don't, someone will be elected who does. Surprisingly, this is true whether we have a two-party system or a 10 party system.

Attacking the UK government over the internet is a sure way to get them to give up on internet surveillance.

Hackitivism by itself can't change anything, but that never was its objective. It's a way to call attention to an issue that the population has the right to be informed about (this is important dammit!). Aware of the issue, it's up to the people to force the politicians to behave.Without stunts like this, how else is a small group of citizens who know more about X (in this case X=Internet/computers) than most inform the other citizens (who know little about X, but know about other stuff) that the government

And they even get a choice of which thing they want to learn... 1. How to respect the rights of the people... or... 2. How to make a web site and its servers secure. Sheesh. Did they set this up with "Government Websites For Dummies"?

They probably already have 2) down pat if they're doing their jobs properly. Remember, all that happened here was a DDoS - there were no gaping holes found in the defences of the websites. Anonymous just happened to have more resources than the Government websites did and thus managed to make the sites unresponsive for a couple of hours.But of course you already know this since you're the kind of discerning Slashdotter who reads linked articles and has at least a basic understanding of the topics on

It would be far less confusing to those who don't realize it's just your average every-day folk behind these stunts. It's really just the common man turned vigilante... Either this, or label all vigilante acts with unknown perpetrators as the work of Anonymous -- Because that's what it's come to.

Here, I'll demonstrate:

Today, someone hacked multiple UK government websites over the country's 'draconian surveillance proposals' and 'derogation of civil rights.' At the time of writing, the following websites were taken down: homeoffice.gov.uk, number10.gov.uk, and justice.gov.uk. Someone is not pleased with the UK government's plans to monitor Internet users.

The only positive thing the "hacktivists" accomplish is force companies to contribute more resources to securing their systems. Most of these attacks take advantage of poor IT practices such as not remaining up to date security updates. They also provide the politions with the ammunition to enact more stringent laws.

There are only a few data centers capable of fighting off a DDOS and your right this type of attack is almost impossible to withstand for most companies. However, the posers acting as "hacktivist" have taking advantage of systems which were not current on the security patches. Too many mid to large companies have too much red tape to get these updates in place. These types of decisions are usually left in the hands of some management knot head following the "correct procedure". After all if they follow the

They're called Anonymous because they're not just random people, but rather a stand alone complex [wikipedia.org]—which, albeit, is just a group of random people, but with the addition of unintended or decentralized cooperation. And that's something to which it is meaningful to give a name.

They are much better organised than their propaganda would led you to believe. This was a coordinated DDoS attack with dozens of members participating and Anonymous have claimed responsibility over it.

The current state of the UK is a good example of a governmentwhich has more interest in remaining in power than anythingelse it might be doing which could be more productive and might actuallyserve its citizens.

As an aside, this is pretty much a preview of what you will see the USgovernment do in the next 20 years. In both cases it amounts to thepointless thrashing of an empire which is either already defunct orwill soon be.

... but they should be locked up until they figure out how to press for change by democratic means.

This is a relatively small group of people, few of whom are UK citizens, that are using force to impose their ideology. They assume that their radical perspectives are supported by the majority, but are unwilling to test that by legally participating in the legislative process.

In other words, these are a bunch of hot heads that want to ram their ideas down everyone else's throats. In that sense they aren't t

Revolution is only an option when democratic and legal institutions do not exist, or there is concrete evidence that they have failed. If you seek revolution when those institutions exist, you are basically saying that your opinions are more important than those of the majority and that the courts have failed to protect minority rights.

Any such arguments for the UK, US, Canada, etc. are dubious at best. Yes, our institutions have problems but fixing those problems involves reform rather than revolution.

So-called "democracy" as it exists in countries like the US is a complete sham. The government can act against the public interest on literally every single issue and still stay in power: any individual is only going to be knowledgeable about a small fraction of what the government does, and a majority of people will just take the media's word for it that they're doing right on most everything else.

The only issues on which the public actually has any influence are those which our rulers recognize to be of relatively minor importance, so the parties can put on a show of virulently disagreeing on them, which makes people feel like they're actually making a difference when they throw out corporate-owned party A and put into power corporate-owned party B. On the most important issues, there's always bipartisan agreement on the wrong side.

1. has suspended Habeas Corpus
2. has taken and imprisoned citizenry from the street without being charged with a crime or receiving due process
3. allows police to detain and strip search anyone for any accusation
4. has not followed it's own laws for electing a president (see bush vs gore)

I'd say it's safe to assume the rule of law in the U.S. is long gone. When you've discarded the highest law in the land (the constitution) so blatantly and completely what law exactly is there left to respect? These are not "problems with institutions" but rather a complete and intentional disregard for the law as stated. This is not to mention the unending general surveillance of it's people which is rather clearly protect by that same constitution. What exactly do you require to classify it as beyond the rule of law?

I can't speak to the case of the U.K. since I am ignorant of the specifics of the laws there but I suspect there is some basis for the protection of liberties and privacy of the people in the law there. How that reconciles with what seems to be the population under the greatest surveillance by their government is beyond me.

Imagine Bush had passed a law which could suspend the US constitution at whim (Civil Contingencies Act) and a second law which could change its words without debate in congress, just a vote (Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act).

Imagine he'd mandated that everyone in the country should be fingerprinted and iris-scanned and that they should be required to identify themselves digitally wherever they go (Identity Cards Act).

This UK government was Labour (Blair & Brown) who passed a much longer list of tot

Revolution should be an option, but it should always be the last option. The problem with responding drastically is that the people who are abusing the power to begin with will only abuse it more to counter what they see as a threat. The cycle feeds itself.

That's why violence is such a lousy idea. Sure, it may sound gratifying to give the bastards what they deserve, but the bastards will always come back with even more violence.

Revolution is the ultimate democratic action: the people rising up en masse against tyranny (or for tyranny, in some cases. Democracy doesn't always work for freedom).

Far different from script kiddies "hacking" (actually DDoSing, which isn't "hacking" any more than driving a Fisher Price toy is "driving") a few government websites because they are pissed off over something (even if they are right to be pissed). That is more like scribbling graffiti: not democratic, just annoying.

The UK is worse than even the US in terms of having the majority tacitly throw their support behind anything proposed (e.g. pan-surveillance and complete removal of any sort of personal defense) regardless of the tyrannical governmental momentum involved. A blindly accepting majority coupled with an increasingly restrictive government is a recipe for democracy breaking. the fuck. down.
Their ideology rejects the progression of this perceived breakdown, and implicates the mechanisms by which a populace is t

A blindly accepting majority coupled with an increasingly restrictive government is a recipe for democracy breaking. the fuck. down.

No, a European government that is not voted in by the people's of Europe is a recipe for democracy breaking down, since there is no democracy. It doesn't matter which way vote for the UK government because the European government is in control.

For what it's worth, I do support privacy. Yet I believe that the rule of law and democracy are far more important.

You do not have the right to vote away someone else's rights. It doesn't matter if 99.9999999% of people support it, they do not have the right to strip another person of their rights. Then again, I suppose this IS the UK we're talking about where people don't have rights because they're subjects, not citizens.

Wether the majority would support their goals or not is irrelevant, they don't have sufficient access to the media in order to inform the majority of what their goals are... The majority only reads what the large media companies want them to read, and those companies have an interest in maintaining the status quo.

From the first line of the article "Summary: Anonymous has launched a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) against multiple UK government websites."Far less impressive than hacking the sites IMO. Then they could have left a message.

to do. Who cares about a website? Websites are superfluous. But hack their Blackberries and you will get their attention. Hack their family's accounts, and you will get their attention. The politicians of the world need to know that their very lives are at the mercy of geeks, and that the geeks are not pleased.

If geeks would work together, this kind of BS would nearly instantly stop because modern life would be impossible without the active or passive participation of geeks.

Hack their Blackberries and they'll pay other geeks enough (or just allow them to keep their jobs) to fix the problems. Hack their family's accounts and they'll find a way to track you down and imprison you.

Their lives are not at the "mercy of the geeks", and it doesn't matter one little fuck that the "geeks are not pleased". People with technical skills are commodities to those in power; those whose primary skills are amassing fortunes through corruption, building high-level relationships and brokering power- things that 98% of geeks are unable to accomplish.

Geeks are like honeybees- You give them a nice little hive to buzz around in with Aeron chairs, free snacks, and maybe a few stock options, then point them to a pretty field of flowers in which to gather pollen and keep them focused and happy, then every once and a while you open the hive and take the honey that they bust their asses to make. Piss them off and you might get stung once and a while, but 99% of the time, you're going to get the honey. "But, but look at Google and Facebook and Amazon, and, and...." Yep- and look at who steers those corporate ships now, Sparky. In the majority of these types of successes, the geeks took their cash and split- Don't ask them to organize your little geek uprising.

"If the geeks would work together".... yep, If only they would. If I had wheels I'd be a fucking wagon. If only, for that matter, anyone that feels outrage against an unfair or oppressive system would actually "work together". You need a leader, and organization for that to happen, which involves actually finding someone who is a geek (or maybe just technically literate) AND a leader AND willing to put his or her neck on the line against existing power... good luck with that, pal.

Your post is so heart-breakingly naive and cliched that it's not even worth making fun of. What's really disturbing is that you have a low number next to your name- You're too damned old to be that damned naive.

All these hackers are doing is making the government realize how inadequate the system currently is such that a small group of people can cause this much havoc. This will speed along more laws to help crack down on net traffic because they see an obvious security threat to the countries well being. This is counter productive anonymous. This isn't simple protesting. It's actual acts of crime and vandalism against a sovereign state. This will only make things worse in the long run.